Grief is not for him. He's seen his share of it, of course; there are enough red-lined eyes and gaping, down-turned mouths amid enough final wails echoing in his dreams, and when an old woman's face crumples like wet newspaper over the twist of a flower stem, that part at least feels familiar. But his hand pulls tense in his sleeve, the shine to his eyes going cool and still in answer. It's not for him to feel.
The preparations are no more a place for him. He moves with the ebb and flow of the crowd, but he isn't a part of it, doesn't engage with it the way she does. Death means something else for him, the completion of one task, the start of another; dispose of the body, destroy the evidence, erase the target and then yourself. The goal has always been to nullify a life, not celebrate it, and the mourners remind him instead of the hushed crowd flowing across smooth museum floors, of a history he's still struggling to make his own.
Speeches, however, he understands. Political machinations. Her too, in bits and pieces. He'd read her SHIELD file, back before all this, but more than that the things she'd said after his extraction, the understated empathy in their interactions has fostered enough tentative trust that he seeks her out in the crowd, in her sharp clothes and her new hair and someone else's skin. It's been a week or two since he'd gotten strong enough to disappear from the Shangrila, but he steps into place next to her like no time has passed at all.
"You could almost be one of them," he says from beneath his hood, like he hadn't just crossed a deck full of people without anyone sparing him a second glance, but what she's doing is different. Being someone, instead of no one. He sounds almost impressed. (Envious, maybe.)
no subject
The preparations are no more a place for him. He moves with the ebb and flow of the crowd, but he isn't a part of it, doesn't engage with it the way she does. Death means something else for him, the completion of one task, the start of another; dispose of the body, destroy the evidence, erase the target and then yourself. The goal has always been to nullify a life, not celebrate it, and the mourners remind him instead of the hushed crowd flowing across smooth museum floors, of a history he's still struggling to make his own.
Speeches, however, he understands. Political machinations. Her too, in bits and pieces. He'd read her SHIELD file, back before all this, but more than that the things she'd said after his extraction, the understated empathy in their interactions has fostered enough tentative trust that he seeks her out in the crowd, in her sharp clothes and her new hair and someone else's skin. It's been a week or two since he'd gotten strong enough to disappear from the Shangrila, but he steps into place next to her like no time has passed at all.
"You could almost be one of them," he says from beneath his hood, like he hadn't just crossed a deck full of people without anyone sparing him a second glance, but what she's doing is different. Being someone, instead of no one. He sounds almost impressed. (Envious, maybe.)